Eldon Harte obituary

Eldon Harte was proud to wear his uniform and rose to the many challenges of being a prison officer.

My uncle Eldon Harte, who has died aged 74, combined a distinguished career in the prison service with competitive body-building and singing. He was a hugely charismatic man of great warmth and kindness.

The son of a postmaster, Eldon was born in what was then British Guiana and is now Guyana, South America, and raised in Georgetown, the capital. He was a sickly child; his physical ailments drove him to undertake a regime of physical exercise, and he discovered a love of body-building. Guyana in the 1940s had few gyms, so he built his own weights and trained in the back garden. Eldon's perseverance paid off and, at 16, he set a schoolboy weightlifting record that still stands.

Eldon spent 14 years in the police force, rising to the rank of corporal. In that role, he provided the official motorcycle escort for visiting dignitaries. When Guyana achieved independence in 1966, he proudly led the Guyanese prime minister, Forbes Burnham, to the national park to raise the Golden Arrowhead, the country's new ensign.

When Eldon moved to Britain, his early experiences were blighted by racism. Undeterred, he secured a job with the prison service, and, in 1972, became the first black officer at Wormwood Scrubs prison, in west London. Many of the inmates had never seen a black man in a position of authority, and thought he was a visiting African king, he said, there to observe and replicate the prison system in his homeland.

Eldon was proud to wear his uniform and rose to the many challenges of the job. In 1982, he was commended by William Whitelaw, the home secretary, for his role in negotiations during a hostage-taking incident. Meanwhile, he continued to accumulate body-building honours, adding senior category trophies to the Mr Guyana national titles he had won from 1964 to 1966. He was well-respected by colleagues and inmates, and eventually retired from the prison service in 2008, aged 73.

My uncle was a wonderful singer. His deep, mellifluous tones were often compared with Nat King Cole's. In his earlier days he was the crooner for the Guyana-based soul group The Crusaders. Eldon is survived by Cornelia, his wife of 34 years, their daughter, Lovella, and a son and a daughter from an earlier marriage.